Industry: Consumer Web, AdvertisingOffering Description: Lookery provides demographic marketing services in and around social networks. We’re working to fix the the basic economic problem that social networks face: great user profiling but unpredictable ad inventory.

Offering Description: By making it easier to get cash out of old consumer electronics, we magnify the impact of sustainability by helping folks participate in the mission whether they care about it or not, (i.e. if you care only about the cash, fine, here's the cash - if you care about the mission too, fabulous - here's cash and a mission! :) ) and thus, just like Ben & Jerry's, The Body Shop and others, we put the power of business to work in making a social difference.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Being from the Midwest, I am all for agricultural analogies. So to continue with the Seed Corn theme and adding to the meme, I offer the following:

Reading an a blog focused on Start-up Ventures in India I came upon this excerpt about a " farmer whose corn won top awards year after year. When a reporter asked about the secret of his success, the farmer attributed it to the fact that he shared his corn with his neighbors. Why, the reporter wondered, would the farmer want to share his seed when those neighbors also competed with him for the prize? The farmer’s reply was, “The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grew inferior corn, cross-pollination would steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors do the same.”

Boston has not been known as a place where the start-up community 'shares the seed corn'. However that is changing and anyone involved will attest to an increased energy and camaraderie within the early stage venture populace.

More sharing, communication, cooperation and networking will strengthen our start-up DNA and propagate future companies. So I look forward to 2008 and seeing the results of the rising energy and cross pollination taking place in the early stage community here in theHub. Get out there and rub some anthers! Happy Holidays to All

Thursday, December 20, 2007

We are excited about the Boston launch of Genotrope. Keep in tune with what is happening with Boston early stage companies. The site is fully functional and ready for you to submit your resume to the hundreds of companies hiring for thousands of jobs here in the Boston area. So as we move into the holiday season, after you Elf Yourself , check out Genotrope and let us know what you think.

Offering Description: RightsAgent is a provider of copyright management solutions for user-generated content. The initial release of our platform allows publishers to register where they publish online, consolidate their work into a personal feed for their readers to subscribe to, and perform copyright transactions with those who wish to license their work.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Sorry to see a company bite the dust. Read the founders post here. The current project Spark, a conversation oriented application that is based on the idea that extended interactions take place at varying tempos. Seems like it has potential and the architect is hoping to keep it alive. Anyone that is interested should contact Mark Waks.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

I was browsing through the blog of Dan Bricklin when I came across an interesting post about his involvement with Blogger. It is a great story and an indication of what a nice guy Dan is. The rest is history as Blogger was eventually acquired by Google and Evan Williams has gone on to his next ground breaking communications application, Twitter.

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It is probably no surprise to you all, that there are a lot of career opportunities available for anyone in the emerging technology industry here in Boston. A recent Xconomy article regarding the Talent War here in the Boston area, did a good job of pointing this out.

The key point for hiring companies was, once you have identified the right candidate, you have to move fast to bring them on board . Also, good companies find a great candidate first and do not try to fit them into a job description. And lastly, candidates from start ups are very valuable, yet hard to attract to the larger companies.

According to SVB Analytics, bubble era companies make up one third of the current private technology companies.

This information paints a much different picture than the horrible nuclear winter we all remember with crashing paper values and losses of jobs.

My take away is that the underlying trends were sound and increased communication, personalization, disintermediation etc... would have a lasting effect, but the gold rush mentality overcame reality and it crashed to a halt.

Another interesting point is that 70% of those firms have received funding within the last 3 years and are significant in the current mergers and acquisition activity. Please read the linked article for the details.